Twitter….seemingly so much promise, but for those of us who aren’t social media experts…what’s the real deal?

Pear Analytics released a new study on Twitter usage trends. They tracked 2,000 tweets over a 2-week period and then categorized them into six usage buckets: news tweets, spam, self-promotion (my favorite), pointless babble, conversational tweets, and pass-along value. Tweets containing “RT” were categorized as “pass along”, and those using “@” were considered conversational.

The study revealed that over two thirds of tracked tweets were either “pointless babble” or “conversational”. I suppose this isn’t too surprising. However, the study found that news-related tweets constituted the smallest category; less than 4% of tweets are news-related.

The study is provided in whitepaper format on Pear’s website and is worth a read. There are also some interesting findings on user demographics and the overall reach of Twitter.

I’ve been a Twitter user for a couple of years now. My usage is casual at best. Maybe I’ll check once or twice a day and perhaps post a handful of tweets a week. I’ve never really used it for promotion, nor have I made any effort to recruit followers. I find it useful for tracking news and updates on industries I’m interested in—hash tags are the most useful feature to me. But getting to the good stuff requires a lot of sifting. Several months ago I removed all the so-called “social media experts” from my follow list and the results were remarkable. It’s amazing how such a small group of power-users can create so much useless static.

Check out the visualization below (from Gizmodo). Despite the hype and promise, it’s easy to make the case that Twitter has become a soapbox for a select group of loud mouths. This statistic is likely one that keeps the Twitter founders up at night—it points to unsustainable business model.

The Pear Analytics study is one of several that have clearly illustrated that Twitter provides value in terms of reach, trend-tracking, and marketing. However, the majority of content is either pointless or conversational and likely not of interest to the largest Twitter population: relatively passive users like me. The study highlighted a new service called Philtro that uses preferences and complex algorithms to serve up only the Tweets that you real care about—supposedly leaving the junk behind.

Related posts:

• Healthcare Marketing and Government Reforms
• Looking forward to the FDA hearing on social media
• The Hierarchy Of Digital Distractions | Information Is Beautiful

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 18th, 2009 at 9:26 am and is filed under Business, Data Visualization, Statistics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.